[HN Gopher] FCC Closes Robocall Loophole
___________________________________________________________________
FCC Closes Robocall Loophole
Author : bragr
Score : 106 points
Date : 2022-06-30 20:36 UTC (2 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.fcc.gov)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.fcc.gov)
| KennyBlanken wrote:
| > How We Got Here: In 2020, the FCC granted voice service
| providers with 100,000 or fewer subscriber lines an extension of
| STIR/SHAKEN* implementation requirements, consistent with the
| TRACED Act. However, since then evidence emerged that a subset of
| these small voice service providers were originating an
| increasing quantity of illegal robocalls.
|
| _shocked pikachu face_. Which explains why Canada didn 't
| provide any exemptions.
|
| Also, I love this bit from Wikipedia:
|
| > The name was inspired by Ian Fleming's character James Bond,
| who famously prefers his martinis "shaken, not stirred." STIR
| having existed already, the creators of SHAKEN "tortured the
| English language until [they] came up with an acronym.
|
| "Signature-based Handling of Asserted information using toKENs"
| mulmen wrote:
| Is this kind of phased rollout uncommon? It's how the $15.00
| minimum wage rolled out in Washington state.
|
| CALEA rollout was before my time, I wonder if it had a similar
| rollout.
| 999900000999 wrote:
| The best exclusive feature to Pixel Phones is call screening.
|
| Every call has to talk to Google assistant first. Makes up for
| Google removing HDMI output.
| ohmanjjj wrote:
| This did absolutely nothing. Carriers like Bandwidth, Commio,
| Telnyx don't enforce this and just complete their customers calls
| as if nothing ever happened.
| ceejayoz wrote:
| Enforcement starts tomorrow. June 30 is the deadline for
| STIR/SHAKEN implementation at small (under 100k subscriber)
| outfits.
| ohmanjjj wrote:
| Already confirmed with them that absolutely nothing is going
| to happen.
| amalter wrote:
| Do you have a list of other carriers who will not comply?
| I'll call my senator about these 3. I suggest others do the
| same.
|
| As mentioned, there is concern about if the FCC can enforce
| these rules. But Robospam is bi-partisan. This is one issue
| I think even our dysfunctional government can agree on.
| ceejayoz wrote:
| I don't think _they_ get to determine whether they get
| prosecuted by the FCC.
| KennyBlanken wrote:
| What is your source for this? ("I work in the industry"
| isn't good enough, in case you're starting to say that.)
|
| Link us to some sort of industry news site, or press
| releases, etc.
| ohmanjjj wrote:
| My source is that we reached out and have high level
| folks at each carrier saying ain't nothing gonna change
| tomorrow or after.
| KennyBlanken wrote:
| Did I stutter when I said "provide a link"? You're some
| rando on an internet website.
| ohmanjjj wrote:
| Do you really think they will make a publish statement
| about this? Call them and see for yourself. There is
| absolutely no Stir Shaken verification of any kind other
| than a look up in the robocall mitigation database where
| each VoIP business self attests to complying with
| inquiries and other fcc robocall regulations. Takes 5
| minutes to create such an entry for your VoIP company and
| nobody checks it
| ceejayoz wrote:
| > Do you really think they will make a publish statement
| about this?
|
| No, but that's why I'm skeptical about your claim; I
| don't think they'd tell _you_ that either.
|
| If they did, I'd encourage you to whistleblow.
| ohmanjjj wrote:
| I have a very successful VoIP business, why would I blow
| the whistle? A couple months away from finalizing our
| Stir Shaken certification, no need to mess things up
| ahead of time :)
| ceejayoz wrote:
| I dunno if the FCC has a program, but whistleblowing can
| be pretty profitable.
|
| https://www.sec.gov/news/press-release/2021-211
| ketralnis wrote:
| So are you, who are you to order them around?
| ceejayoz wrote:
| "Nothing's going to change" could mean "nothing's going
| to change _for you_ " or "it doesn't apply to us yet for
| reason x", or "we've been compliant long before today".
| Wording matters, and I find it fairly hard to believe a
| large VoIP provider is going to openly go "oh yeah we're
| looking to intentionally get smacked down by the FCC".
| ketralnis wrote:
| What does this mean? You called Bandwidth, Commio, & Telnyx
| and asked?
| ohmanjjj wrote:
| Correct, we use all 3 for our VoIP business.
| alberth wrote:
| Twilio
|
| Hope this curbs spammers ability to use Twilio like services.
| CWuestefeld wrote:
| A large majority of the phone spam I get is about automotive
| extended warranties. Shouldn't we be holding _that_ industry
| responsible for this? Would a campaign of "would you trust
| someone who spams you for insurance?", and letting the insurers
| compete on claims that "we'll never try to sell to you over the
| phone", help?
| blep_ wrote:
| Do any of them actually sell extended warranties? I assumed
| they were scammers.
|
| (Also, I _wish_ Nationwide would stop trying to sell to me over
| the phone. They 're amazingly persistent.)
| CWuestefeld wrote:
| If we're guessing that this is all fraud anyway, why would we
| think that a law against phone spam would be where the
| spammers draw the line, the crime they're not willing to
| commit? Won't they keep spamming, just like they're already
| defrauding?
| blep_ wrote:
| Oh, you mean the scam "warranty" industry and not the real
| warranty industry. My mistake.
| jfim wrote:
| I don't think that the insurers for those extended warranties
| are the same as the legitimate ones that a consumer would
| normally go to for insurance. That's assuming there's even a
| product that's being sold, and not someone just calling people,
| pocketing the money, and running away with it.
| criddell wrote:
| > I don't think that the insurers for those extended
| warranties are the same as the legitimate ones that a
| consumer would normally go to for insurance.
|
| Sure they are. It's just that the phone scammers are living
| off of affiliate and referral fees.
| sthatipamala wrote:
| Here's the full text of the release. I don't know why they just
| don't just put it on the page itself... :
|
| Media Contact: Will Wiquist will.wiquist@fcc.gov
|
| For Immediate Release
|
| FCC CLOSES ROBOCALL LOOPHOLE FCC Robocall Response Team Has Taken
| Enforcement Actions, Built Nationwide Partnerships, and Proposed
| Innovative New Policies to Combat Scam Robocalls -- WASHINGTON,
| June 30, 2022--Starting today certain small phone companies must
| comply with FCC rules to implement caller ID authentication tools
| on their networks, just as large voice service providers are
| required to since June 30, 2021. Today's announcement is the
| latest in a series of actions by the FCC's Robocall Response Team
| to cut off the flood of unwanted robocalls hitting consumers and
| business phone networks. These small phone companies are
| suspected of facilitating large numbers of illegal robocalls and,
| as a result, the FCC rolled back an extended caller ID
| authentication implementation timeline granted to them in its
| original 2020 rules.
|
| "Each time I get a robocall it reminds me that we can't stop
| looking for ways to stop these nuisance calls and the scams
| behind them," said FCC Chairwoman Jessica Rosenworcel. "Our team
| is working to aggressively and creatively find ways to fight
| back. We will use every authority we have, and we will go to
| Congress for more. We will not let up."
|
| How We Got Here: In 2020, the FCC granted voice service providers
| with 100,000 or fewer subscriber lines an extension of
| STIR/SHAKEN* implementation requirements, consistent with the
| TRACED Act. However, since then evidence emerged that a subset of
| these small voice service providers were originating an
| increasing quantity of illegal robocalls. As a result, in 2021,
| the FCC unanimously voted to shorten the extension by a year.
|
| Recent FCC investigations and reports from the Industry Traceback
| Group indicate that, since STIR/SHAKEN was widely implemented
| across the largest providers' networks last year, robocallers
| have sought to maintain anonymity and avoid enforcement and
| blocking tools by routing or originating their call traffic on
| the networks of these largely IP-based* small providers that have
| not yet implemented STIR/SHAKEN. This has allowed robocalls to
| pass from these networks to terminating provider networks without
| carrying forward accurate and standardized caller ID/traceback
| information.
|
| What's New: Effective today, a problematic gap in FCC robocall
| rules closed, requiring non-facilities based small voice service
| providers* to implement STIR/SHAKEN caller ID authentication
| standards on their networks. These providers are now required to
| implement STIR/SHAKEN caller ID authentication standards on the
| IP portion of their networks.
|
| The Bigger Picture: Under Chairwoman Rosenworcel's leadership,
| the Robocall Response Team was created to serve as an FCC staff
| working group that pulls together expertise from across the
| agency to leverage the talents of enforcers, attorneys, policy
| makers, engineers, economists, and outreach experts to combat the
| unyielding menace of illegal spoofed, scam, robocalls.
|
| This effort has resulted in: * record-breaking spoofing and
| robocall fines; * closing gateways used by international
| robocallers to reach Americans' phones; * widespread
| implementation of STIR/SHAKEN caller ID authentication standards
| to help traceback illegal calls and improve blocking tools to
| protect consumers; * the signing of robocall investigation
| partnerships with the large majority of state Attorneys General;
| * and unprecedented policy proposals to combat the rising threat
| of bogus robotexts.
|
| ###
|
| Appendix of frequently used terms: * STIR/SHAKEN Caller ID
| authentication: Caller ID authentication, based on so-called
| STIR/SHAKEN standards, provides a common information sharing
| language between networks to verify caller ID information which
| can be used by robocall blocking tools, FCC investigators, and by
| consumers trying to judge if an incoming call is likely
| legitimate or not. * Non-facilities-based voice service
| providers: A voice service provider is non-facilities based if it
| offers voice service to end users using connections that are not
| sold by the provider or its affiliates. Instead, their voice
| service is transmitted over another provider's transmission
| service. * IP-based telephony: IP telephony is shorthand for
| Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP), which is a technology that
| allows a user to make voice calls using a broadband Internet
| connection instead of a regular (or analog) phone line.
|
| Media Relations: (202) 418-0500 / ASL: (844) 432-2275 / Twitter:
| @FCC / www.fcc.gov
|
| This is an unofficial announcement of Commission action. Release
| of the full text of a Commission order constitutes official
| action. See MCI v. FCC, 515 F.2d 385 (D.C. Cir. 1974).
| TaylorAlexander wrote:
| Fascinating that they offer the press release in Docx, PDF, and
| TXT format but not, you know... HTML format.
| annoyingnoob wrote:
| Sigh, got a robocall as I was reading the announcement.
| codazoda wrote:
| > When people can't trust that callers are who they claim to be,
| they stop answering even legitimate calls.
|
| Yeah, my phone has been defaulted to silent for all callers that
| are not in my contact list for a dozen years no. I'll never go
| back to answering calls from people I don't know.
|
| On very rare occasions I'll miss a call from someone I did
| business with that's not in my contact list, but they typically
| leave messages that I can respond to.
| ericbarrett wrote:
| Is this why the number of spam texts I'm getting exploded
| recently? The scamming of the American public and the degradation
| of our infrastructure continues apace.
| ceejayoz wrote:
| If they're political - I've been getting a massive uptick in
| campaign texts - that's because politicians exempted themselves
| from the spam text rules.
| Glant wrote:
| (Not OP) I get about one spam text a day and it's always some
| vaguely sexual message with a shortened link in it.
| MiddleEndian wrote:
| I don't answer my phone, but I've been getting these texts
| too recently.
| philsnow wrote:
| I've also seen a large uptick in the number of them (~1/week
| vs 0 before), and they're not political, they're mostly
| scammers pretending to know me. I haven't played along enough
| yet to learn what they're after, but they're from all kinds
| of US area codes in places I've never lived.
| ericbarrett wrote:
| For me, real scam texts--mostly bank and Amazon order
| phishing. I get the political ones too but wasn't even
| counting them.
| haunter wrote:
| Why is this a thing in the US? Feels like a unique american
| thing. I'm in Europe and I don't think I got more than 2 or 3
| spam SMS or robocall in the last 20 years.
| toast0 wrote:
| Calling and SMS to the US is super cheap, under a penny per
| minute or per text at bulk rates. Calling or texting a mobile
| phone in Europe is usually ten cents or more per minute/text at
| bulk rates.
|
| There's also a lot fewer languages to deal with in the US, most
| random recipients can be scammed in English, and if you can
| also scam en Espanol, that probably brings you to 80%+ of a
| market with a lot of ability to pay over the phone. A good
| target market for many things.
| foresto wrote:
| Is yours a mobile phone? Call termination to European mobile
| numbers is often much more expensive than to any US number. I
| imagine those costs would add up quickly for bulk callers.
| labster wrote:
| Because the US Supreme Court has undergone regulatory capture
| by monied interests.
| InCityDreams wrote:
| ...and all the many different European courts?
| undersuit wrote:
| Too many courts to court. It's why I advocate the US return
| to the ratio of representatives originally defined in the
| constitution; harder to bribe ~13,000 representatives than
| 435.
| Vespasian wrote:
| Because in the US privacy doesn't seem to be a high priority
| for federal politicians (of either party if you ask me).
|
| Such things have been regulated by national and European law
| for ages over here, and the GDPR was the latest brick in that
| wall.
|
| I recall that in particular Americans were very surprised when
| it passed, while for most Europeans it was simply the
| harmonization and continuation of very similar earlier laws.
|
| While the GDPR (and predecessors and co-laws) is certainly not
| perfect, sometimes it works very well.
| kennywinker wrote:
| Coming soon - supreme court declares that federal government
| can't regulate phone calls because constitution doesn't give a
| right to no annoying calls. "It's up for the states to decide"
| says majority opinion.
| gowld wrote:
| This action is pursuant to the TRACED Act
|
| https://www.congress.gov/bill/116th-congress/senate-bill/151
|
| > This bill establishes rules and requirements to deter
| criminal robocall violations.
|
| > Specifically, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC)
| must [do stuff related to caller ID]. The bill also implements
| a forfeiture penalty for violations (with or without intent) of
| the prohibitions on certain robocalls.
| krisroadruck wrote:
| Heh you joke but look up laws related to door-to-door sales.
| Despite the fact there isn't a homeowner in the country that
| wants people to physically come on their property, interrupt
| their day and spam them to their face - it is impossible to get
| a law passed preventing it.
| CWuestefeld wrote:
| You say "there isn't a homeowner in the country that wants
| people to..." as if that should have some bearing on how the
| Court determines cases.
|
| The job of the Court is not to determine what's good or bad
| policy, or to react based on people's wishes. The Court's job
| is to interpret the laws through the lens of the
| Constitution. If the Constitution doesn't give Congress the
| authority to do something (as it certainly wouldn't in your
| example, see Article I Section 8 [1]), it's the job of the
| Court to strike down the law no matter how many people would
| like the law.
|
| [1] https://www.law.cornell.edu/constitution/articlei
| craftyguy wrote:
| that might be the "Court's job", but that doesn't mean they
| will be doing their job without extreme personal/political
| bias that allows them to bend the lens to their liking.
|
| They are 100% reacting to people's wishes, even if
| CWuestefeld thinks they are not.
| vlark wrote:
| Have you heard of these things called trespassing laws? And
| stand your ground laws? Don't need a "no soliciting" law if
| you got those. All you have to do is say you felt threatened
| by the salesperson and thought they were going for a gun. /s
| [deleted]
| tatersolid wrote:
| Inter-state phone calls are clearly subject to the Commerce
| Clause of the US Constitution, and therefore within the
| regulatory purview of the US Congress. Even Clarence Thomas
| would agree.
| jcranmer wrote:
| Instead, they'd say that Congress didn't clearly intend for
| the FCC to be able to regulate phone calls.
| ohmanjjj wrote:
| There is still a loophole. You get one more year if you are
| "facilities based". All you need is one subscriber to whom you
| also provide broadband connection and you're covered under the
| facilities based definition even if you have a thousand other end
| users over the top.
| jkubicek wrote:
| As a consumer who's cellphone and IP-based landline are
| effectively useless for incoming phone calls, what can I do to
| help report these robo calls?
|
| We just recently purchased a landline and have told nobody our
| phone number, so 100% of incoming calls are spam (and we get a
| few every day). It's amazingly frustrating.
| fossuser wrote:
| If on an iPhone turn on silence unknown callers.
|
| It's an incoming call whitelist, others go to voicemail.
|
| This makes this a non issue.
| excitom wrote:
| Trouble is, some calls go to voicemail that you really wanted
| - like the doctor's office with your test results or the shop
| telling you your car is ready.
| fossuser wrote:
| Yeah this is the complaint people often bring up, but in
| practice I've found it doesn't matter in real world usage.
| junar wrote:
| The feature is to silence _unknown_ callers. If you know
| the numbers that they 're calling from, you can simply add
| them as contacts. As a whole, I think the feature is worth
| the tradeoffs.
| ceejayoz wrote:
| There are often important calls that come from
| unpredictable numbers, like a credit card fraud
| department.
| brian_herman wrote:
| Yeah on android I saw my friend screen callers. It was built
| into android.
| wl wrote:
| Those missed unknown callers still result in a missed call, a
| voicemail notification, and increase that red badged number,
| mixed in with missed calls from friends and family I actually
| care about. It solves the issue of spam callers immediately
| interrupting what I'm doing, but that's all. I still have to
| sort through the crap.
| walrus01 wrote:
| telecom industry here, honestly, nothing. SS7/PSTN are horribly
| broken.
|
| only thing that will fix it is burning it to the ground.
|
| fcc regulations and penalties mean nothing to shady offshore
| grey market scam call centers in india using
| suspicious/unethical voip providers and methods of getting
| phone traffic to the US/Canada.
|
| shaken/stir is a joke
|
| set up a voip based system with IVR on your incoming DIDs that
| asks the caller to input a short series of digits to be
| connected, then have that series of digits ring your real line.
|
| it will filter out about 98% of the crap
| clhodapp wrote:
| Can... can the telecom industry do that for all of us please?
|
| At this point, it seems like retrofitting CAPTCHA in as an
| expected part of the telephone system seems like the only
| option that will make a significant dent.
| calvinmorrison wrote:
| I want to use my old desk phone, but I want to screen all
| calls to basically "known" numbers. Is this something I can
| do fairly easily? I'd also like a traditional voicemail
| system with playback (does not have to be cassette)
| toast0 wrote:
| I've been looking at this lately as I setup new phone
| service for my MIL who's moving to a place with unreliable
| power. Some phone companies have whitelist services,
| although if your telco is like CenturyLink of Washington
| state, they don't appear to want to actually be in the
| phone business anymore and all the useful services are
| grandfathered, ordering a phone line is an ordeal and
| pricing is crazy (OTOH, the line quality seems to be good
| if you can get it). If you've got a voip line, you've got
| way more options though; I think most providers should give
| you options to whitelist.
|
| Assuming your telco won't help you with whitelisting, your
| options are maybe? getting a new cordless system with
| caller id whitelisting, it seems like maybe some of the
| newest panasonic dect systems can do it (that will take
| care of the answering machine needs as well). Or getting an
| external box, most likely inline with your phone.
|
| I don't have either yet, but it seems like reasonable
| options include the Digitone proseries II [1], or the
| Sentry call blocker[2]. Both are more expensive than they
| should be (IMHO), but offer some amount of whitelisting and
| blacklisting. The Digitone has a longer history in the
| industry, and what looks like a clumsier interface; the
| Sentry has a good, but slightly messy feature for handling
| inbound calls from numbers that aren't 'known', for those
| calls, it answers and plays an outgoing greeting
| (customizable in the 3.x device, prerecorded in 2.x), if
| the caller presses 0, their number is added to the white
| list and they can call back; from reviews, I gather on the
| 2.x series pressing 0 add you to the whitelist and then
| hangs up on you; on the 3.x series, pressing 0 generates a
| fake ringback, makes the device ring (but not phones on the
| line) and after 9 fake rings will let the caller leave a
| message on the sentry device (2 message capacity, FIFO).
| This is like not quite right; the recommendation from
| reviewers is to record a message asking people to press 0
| and then hangup and call back, rather than having them go
| through the weird ringing stuff. There's some negative
| comments about recording quality.
|
| [1] https://digitone.com/ [2] https://www.telsentry.com/
| calvinmorrison wrote:
| 79 bucks? This is perfect...
| toast0 wrote:
| Please email me a review if you set one up. I'm currently
| waiting for the welcome packet so I can try the
| CenturyLink options, but I'm not holding my breath and
| will need to get something soon, cause junky calls are
| already coming in. (surprising noone)
| dataflow wrote:
| I think Google Voice has the ability to enable/disable call
| screening for a group of contacts. Maybe try it out and see
| if it has enough options to let you achieve the effect you
| want?
|
| (Assuming you don't specifically wants POTS though.)
| walrus01 wrote:
| spoofing caller ID is too trivially easy to rely upon known
| numbers on the incoming side as a filter, unfortunately.
| calvinmorrison wrote:
| This is probably true... but I've never had a spoofed
| call that pretended to be my mom, dad, wife, or family.
| That's basically the entire list I care about...
| Symbiote wrote:
| But this isn't a problem in other countries.
|
| My British and Danish mobile phone numbers get less than one
| junk call _per year_.
| pishpash wrote:
| So, phone CAPTCHA, yeah that's going to get attacked just as
| easily when scam money is involved.
| criddell wrote:
| I'd love it if I could set up my phone with a whitelist and
| every caller that isn't on my whitelist should get a busy
| signal.
| codazoda wrote:
| You can kinda do this on your mobile phone (works on both
| android and iOS) by automatically silencing all calls that
| are not in your contact list. Works a treat for me.
| criddell wrote:
| I think callers still get voicemail. I want them to get a
| busy signal.
| xienze wrote:
| Are you sure that's what you want? There's also times
| when you get legitimate calls from people not on your
| whitelist (think, submitted info to a contractor online,
| they call you back later from their personal cell phone,
| etc.).
| dredmorbius wrote:
| Understanding that you don't know everything about or speak
| for the industry, the question I've had for a few years now
| is whether this is a deliberate tactic (I've little doubt
| telcos want to shed wireline service), or just a mess with no
| clear out?
|
| Because the problem's not just with landline but with _any_
| direct-dialed PSTN telecoms system. I don 't want a landline
| _or_ mobile phone any more. The situation 's well past simple
| cord-cutting.
|
| It's been about three years since I stumbled across this
| quote which confirms that at least _someone_ on the inside is
| aware that the present situation is eroding all trust in the
| system, and that this is an existential threat:
|
| _[S]ince mid-2015, a consortium of engineers from phone
| carriers and others in the telecom industry have worked on a
| way to [stop call-spoofing], worried that spam phone calls
| could eventually endanger the whole system. "We're getting to
| the point where nobody trusts the phone network," says Jim
| McEachern, principal technologist at the Alliance for
| Telecommunications Industry Solutions (ATIS.) "When they stop
| trusting the phone network, they stop using it."_
|
| https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2018/05/how-to-stop-spam-
| rob...
|
| (From an earlier HN comment of mine:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21542926
|
| Stir-Shake may have reduced levels of spam, I've no way of
| knowing. But the level it's at remains intolerable and a real
| financial risk to individuals and businesses. I'm personally
| aware of several people who've been scammed of thousands of
| dollars within the past year.
|
| Cut phone service and that threat disappears, along with all
| the attendant billing bullshit and customer service
| nightmares.
|
| Is the industry aware of this and what if anything does it
| plan to do?
| walrus01 wrote:
| my personal opinion is that there is simply too much legacy
| SS7/PSTN junk out there to change the protocol/traffic
| exchange between carriers in any significant way that will
| result in anything ever being fixed.
|
| it's a legacy of the 1950s and 1960s era of the monopoly
| bell system when all of the phone system trusted itself.
|
| the whole way that traffic moves between telcos in the PSTN
| is built on lack of crypto authentication, total trust
| between two phone switches, in a way that would be absurdly
| terrible if run on the modern internet (imagine all your
| online banking as http only, for example).
| dredmorbius wrote:
| Are you aware of any working groups / consortia /
| skunkworks looking into this?
|
| Or have any idea of what a solution-shaped object might
| resemble?
|
| Your answer ... mostly confirms my outsider view. And
| that story ends poorly.
|
| Thanks, regardless.
| walrus01 wrote:
| My POV is biased by working only _adjacent_ to ILEC
| /CLEC/PSTN/SS7 related stuff in telecom, my day job is
| much more focused on building IP based packet last mile
| and middle mile ISP stuff for direct internet access.
| chrisseaton wrote:
| > so 100% of incoming calls are spam
|
| How did they get your number?
| pishpash wrote:
| Randomly generated.
| behringer wrote:
| The only spam I get is from some insurance company out of
| Florida. For whatever reason they won't stop calling. Everybody
| else stopped calling because I would _always_ pick up and
| _always_ try and worm my way through the system, and once
| caught or bored, then start questioning their moral character
| and their family 's opinions of their life choices, or my
| favorite, why they choose to scam people (they always say they
| don't!).
|
| The call volume went way down after a while.
| guelo wrote:
| I use to do the same and then one vindictive scammer attacked
| me with nonstop hangup calls for weeks from random numbers.
| Now I'm more wary of interacting with them at all.
| behringer wrote:
| yes that is always the risk when dealing with criminals :(
| They could just be mental.
| robonerd wrote:
| Try _" Does your mother know you're a thief?"_
|
| American scammers usually laugh at that, but it instantly
| enrages Indian scammers. I think their mothers don't know,
| and would be ashamed if they did.
| walrus01 wrote:
| one of the _worst_ things you can do with them is engage and
| speak as a live human, even if all you 're doing is taunting
| them, because then your number gets permanently marked as a
| live human in some grey/black market spam fuck's CSV file
| they sell to other people.
| ses1984 wrote:
| It can't possibly result in more spam than I'm getting now.
| InCityDreams wrote:
| Answer the call. Do not speak.
|
| They will give up.
|
| If you engage with them they will continue to call. Do not
| speak to them, just answer the call and leave them listening
| to nothing.
|
| # no call center supervisor will let their employee just sit
| there and wait for you to answer....your silence actually
| does cost them money.
| can16358p wrote:
| Would work for humans. Don't think it would work much for
| recorded robot calls, as the cost of the call is probably
| negligible compared to hiring an actual person.
|
| One might even be "marked" as "listening the marketing
| material" which would end up getting more calls.
| imglorp wrote:
| Taking that to the extreme, there are bots that will engage
| the caller with enough noncommittal answers for long enough
| they will truly waste money on you.
|
| Eg, https://jollyrogertelephone.com
| Supermancho wrote:
| > Answer the call. Do not speak.
|
| I grunt and listen for a response (if any). It's pretty
| easy to distinguish a human from a robocall nowadays. There
| was a brief time when a woman's voice would say "hello, uh,
| hello? can you hear me?" which got me once, but that was it
| because it played whether you made noise or not and was
| always the same.
| RajT88 wrote:
| I have done the same. AFAICT it has made no difference in
| call volume.
|
| I did make some vacation package scammers feel bad and hang
| up a couple times. Claiming that I no longer travel because I
| lost my legs In a car accident years back.
|
| Family that can use the vacation package? Nope, they are all
| dead too. The last of them died in the same fiery crash.
| foodstances wrote:
| What's the use case for purchasing a new landline in 2022?
| toast0 wrote:
| Availability when utility power isn't (at least
| theoretically), much lower latency (although everyone else
| has terrible latency, so kind of meh), desire to spend
| $60/month for $15 worth of service that the service provider
| doesn't really want to do anymore anyway. :P
| bombcar wrote:
| Be aware that in some areas unless you specify a "burglar
| alarm" or "elevator emergency phone line" or similar, you
| may end up with a little powered box connected to fibre or
| similar.
|
| Some have battery backup and so kind of work the same as
| before ... for awhile.
| walrus01 wrote:
| elevator alarm line to connect to legacy POTS wiring going to
| the panel in an elevator? maybe
| pishpash wrote:
| An _old_ elevator. If you were to design a new one you
| would route around the Faraday cage.
| jijji wrote:
| what I've heard from multiple sources is that landlines when
| you provision them, by default they get marked as a published
| number. if you provision the line and you mark it as a non-
| published number, usually you're not going to get these types
| of spam calls everyday. I think what's going on is that there's
| a automated campaign that's been going on for probably over a
| decade or two but where people are purchasing a daily list of
| published numbers from the telecom providers themselves and
| then they're using that in their spam campaigns.
| walrus01 wrote:
| more simply they're just robodialing every number in a NPA-
| NXX, there's no daily list of published numbers.
|
| what prefixes in blocks of 10000 numbers belong to what
| specific carrier is public info
| criddell wrote:
| Now that you can port your number between carriers, what
| meaning does the prefix have anymore?
| walrus01 wrote:
| only a little bit, older prefixes like in 206-xxx and
| 360-xxx that are assigned to legacy copper POTS ILEC
| carriers (like Centurylink for big parts of the seattle
| area, or Ziply for the suburbs) are more likely to be
| fixed landline phones and not ported out somewhere else.
|
| prefixes that are assigned to a carrier like tmobile or
| that were a metropcs prefix before its full integration
| into tmobile are _highly likely_ to be cellphones, though
| people can of course port away their number to a voip
| service or something, but more often they would just move
| to verizon or att.
| pishpash wrote:
| So carriers should implement DDOS firewalls.
| Syzygies wrote:
| A few years ago I programmed my phone.com VoIP lines to route
| any call not on my whitelist through a virtual switchboard:
| Dial 7 to speak with me. I haven't had a robocall since.
|
| It's an inconvenience if a company wants to use automation to
| return my call. I can turn this off, temporarily. As I see it,
| it's stupid of any legitimate company to imitate a robocall for
| any reason. I don't walk up to cops carrying a fake gun; they
| shouldn't behave like spammers.
| bragr wrote:
| However, considering I got 2 of these calls today, I'm not sure
| how closed it is yet.
| MBCook wrote:
| They said they closed this one. The deadline for another big
| loophole (foreign gateways) is same time next year.
| gamblor956 wrote:
| The deadline for "gateways" (meaning telephone services
| providers that receive and forward calls from international
| numbers) is still next summer.
|
| Most spams calls have bene originating through those gateways
| for the past few months, so this deadline arriving shouldn't
| have any immediate impact.
| xeromal wrote:
| I'm sure the implementation phase is longer than 1 nanosecond.
| jaywalk wrote:
| The press release is pretty poorly-written, but it sounds
| like today's been the deadline for (at least) a year.
| loeg wrote:
| > June 30, 2022--Starting today certain small phone
| companies must comply with FCC rules to implement caller ID
| authentication tools on their networks, just as large voice
| service providers are required to since June 30, 2021.
|
| Seems like it's very new for small phone companies, but
| yeah I agree today seems to be a deadline.
| InitialLastName wrote:
| > just as large voice service providers are required to
| since June 30, 2021.
|
| So you're saying that, judging by the 3 spam calls I've
| gotten today on my (very large) phone carrier, these
| rules don't do very much.
| loeg wrote:
| My understanding is that enforcement will start tomorrow.
| But I'm not especially familiar with the Telco
| environment. My understanding is also that there is still
| a remaining loophole for international telcos, which will
| close in another year's time.
| 1123581321 wrote:
| The small phone companies are the ones sending the spam
| to you on whichever network you happen to use.
| nkw wrote:
| This will do absolutely nothing. Since the Supreme Court gutted
| the TCPA there is zero downside for companies to violate it.
| crhulls wrote:
| I'm not too familiar with what the Supreme Court did with TCPA,
| but as a developer, we were hit by patent-troll equivalents who
| leveraged the law to shake down companies.
|
| In our case, someone's sister invited him to join their
| account. The text message was initiated by the sister but our
| system sent the SMS via our backend. We were sued because we
| allegedly sent an unsolicited text message and were considered
| an autodialer under TCPA guidelines.
|
| We were able to win the suit, but it cost hundreds of thousands
| of dollars. The law needed a tune up, and if the court decision
| stopped this type of troll suit some good came of it.
|
| I am not defending robocallers. I hope they die. I just
| highlight that sometimes these laws do need to be tightened up
| to stop abuse the other way.
| oneoff786 wrote:
| So you don't know what the court did, but one time you had a
| bad experience with a law, so you're gonna assume the court
| did a good thing?
| vanattab wrote:
| the case was unanimously decided.
| shagie wrote:
| > I'm not too familiar with what the Supreme Court did with
| TCPA ...
|
| June 24, 2021 - https://www.natlawreview.com/article/ripple-
| effects-supreme-...
|
| > If you work in the Telephone Consumer Protection Act (TCPA)
| space, you are certainly aware of the landmark unanimous
| decision by the United States Supreme Court in Facebook v
| Duguid, in which the Court narrowed the definition of an
| automatic telephone dialing system (ATDS) to equipment that
| has the capacity to either store or produce numbers using a
| random or sequential number generator.
|
| > ...
|
| > On June 10, 2021, the District Court for the District of
| South Carolina held that the Aspect predictive dialer did not
| qualify as an ATDS because the evidence proved that the
| system could neither randomly nor sequentially store or
| produce numbers to be dialed
|
| ---
|
| So, if you're working from a list of numbers, it's not an
| ATDS. It is only an ATDS if you're dialing random numbers or
| sequential numbers.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facebook,_Inc._v._Duguid
|
| > The Supreme Court's ruling was seen to be favorable to the
| telemarketing industry, since the decision narrowed the
| definition of an automatic dialing system of which are
| regulated under the TCPA. As few actual automated dialers in
| use at the time of the decision incorporate the random or
| sequential number generator, telemarketers would be able to
| use other automatic dialing systems that do not meet this
| definition to engage in their business, according to the
| National Consumer Law Center. The National Consumer Law
| Center as well as Consumer Reports expressed concern that
| there would be a significant increase in unwanted
| telemarketing calls due to this decision.
|
| > Senator Ed Markey, one of the authors of the TCPA, along
| with Representative Anna Eshoo, called the ruling
| "disastrous", as the Congressional intent of the TCPA was "to
| ban dialing from a database", and announced the same day of
| the decision that they would be looking to introduce amended
| legislation to address the Court's decision.
| labster wrote:
| If that's their interpretation of an obvious law to stop
| something 99% of people hate, I'm sure glad the Supreme
| Court doesn't get to interpret the Constitution.
| shagie wrote:
| The law _very_ clearly specifics what an automatic dialer
| is in https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/47/227
|
| > (1) The term "automatic telephone dialing system" means
| equipment which has the capacity-- (A) to store or
| produce telephone numbers to be called, using a random or
| sequential number generator; and (B) to dial such
| numbers.
| CWuestefeld wrote:
| As described here, it seems like Congress has every
| opportunity to clarify the definition of ATDS. Surely they
| deserve as much blame as the Court, then.
| shagie wrote:
| The specific part of the law is:
| https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/47/227
|
| > (1) The term "automatic telephone dialing system" means
| equipment which has the capacity-- (A) to store or
| produce telephone numbers to be called, using a random or
| sequential number generator; and (B) to dial such
| numbers.
| guelo wrote:
| Congress has been purposefully broken by Republican's new
| requirement that all legislation must receive
| supermajority approval in the senate.
|
| It's part of a coordinated plan to "drown the federal
| government in a bathtub": the courts read legislation as
| narrowly as possible while congress is unable to
| legislate.
| CWuestefeld wrote:
| This is baloney. Let's look at the history
|
| In the current legislative session [1], just counting the
| first page of Senate (I think you're referring to the
| Senate) votes listed because I'm lazy, out of the 100
| votes, I see only 10 that failed. And of those passing, I
| didn't actually count, but a very large proportion are
| passing with less than 60 yeas.
|
| Although we see a lot of political crap going on, the
| Congress still manages to do a lot of business.
|
| [1] https://www.senate.gov/legislative/LIS/roll_call_list
| s/vote_...
| ceejayoz wrote:
| This is bad methodology. Laws blocked by a threatened
| filibuster don't necessarily make it to a vote and thus
| don't show up in this list.
|
| Legislation passing with less than 60 votes still had to
| pass the 60 vote threshold. Some senators vote for debate
| but against the bill.
| shagie wrote:
| I'm not sure a wider reading of the TCPA is possible for
| the definition of an automatic dialing system. Is there
| any _other_ way the courts could read the definition
| provided in
| https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/47/227 ?
| crhulls wrote:
| Look up Edelson, they are the troll firm that sued us.
| They have had significant success taking much wider
| interpretations of the law. Just like patent trolls they
| also assume most people will just settle - we did not but
| it was a gamble.
|
| Here are some of the cases they brag about:
| https://edelson.com/inside-the-firm/905-2/
| CWuestefeld wrote:
| Thanks for looking that up. Yeah, from what's quoted
| here, it's perfectly transparent. (1) The
| term "automatic telephone dialing system" means equipment
| which has the capacity-- (A) to store or produce
| telephone numbers to be called, using a random or
| sequential number generator; and (B) to dial such
| numbers.
|
| Anybody who's claiming the Court is playing games here
| clearly has an agenda of their own. Congress dropped the
| ball.
| ntoskrnl wrote:
| What would the damages have been had you lost? I'm being
| called by a persistent "insurance" salesman that I'd love to
| take to the cleaners
| crhulls wrote:
| I think it is one of those things that would theoretically
| have been billions of dollars (hundreds of millions of
| invites have gone out and the statutory damages were on a
| per infraction basis), but practically speaking something
| very similar to a patent troll, so maybe in the $5-10m
| range? I'm just guessing. We are a later stage company.
| ntoskrnl wrote:
| I didn't know the damages were statutory - I guess I
| should look that up myself. In your case, was it a class
| action suit? If not, I wonder how they had standing to
| sue on behalf of thousands/millions of other users.
| ikiris wrote:
| If you allow people to send unsolicited invite sms... what
| did you expect? You should have _lost_
| crhulls wrote:
| The intent of the TCPA was absolutely not to disallow text
| messages being sent for app invites. We did not spam any
| contacts. A user invited their sister to join them on their
| account by manually selecting them from their contact list.
| We just sent the text message via Twilio vs having the user
| send it themselves.
|
| And regardless of whether you like this or not, this was
| not the use case the law was implemented for, which is to
| stop robocallers.
| guelo wrote:
| This court is on an unstoppable extremist rampage. After
| another decade of their activism the country will be
| unrecognizable
| yojo wrote:
| I wasn't up on this, so looked it up. Apparently they narrowed
| the definition of what "counts as an autodialer" to effectively
| open a large exemption for devices that you or I would consider
| an autodialer. As long as the autodialer doesn't store numbers
| sequentially or generate them randomly it is exempt. e.g. if
| you have a list of non-sequential phone numbers, you can
| autodial to your heart's content.
|
| I thought this post explained it reasonably well:
| https://www.manatt.com/insights/newsletters/tcpa-connect/the...
| CWuestefeld wrote:
| Is there anything preventing Congress from clarifying the
| definition? Assuming not, don't they deserve as much of the
| blame for the mess as folks here are heaping on the Court?
| cwkoss wrote:
| gross incompetence
| ceejayoz wrote:
| Coupled with the assumption that such a stupid ruling
| will just be repeated on a new pretext.
| [deleted]
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